to savour of the headlong actions of stupidity. To suppress a
passion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing a passion is to my
mind just the burial of a talent that has been entrusted to one's care.
One has, I feel, to take all these things as weapons and instruments,
material in the service of the scheme; one has to take them in the end
gravely and do right among them unbiassed in favour of any set. To
take some poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind a cheap and
unsatisfactory way of simplifying one's moral problems. One has to
accept these things in oneself, I feel--even if one knows them to be
dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an evil side.

Let me, however, in order to express my attitude better, make a rough
grouping of the motives I find in myself and the people about me.

2.6. A REVIEW OF MOTIVES.

I cannot divide them into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps
begin with those that bring one into the widest sympathy with living
things and go on to those one shares only with highly intelligent and
complex human beings.

There come first the desires one shares with those more limited souls
the beasts, just as much as one does with one's fellow man. These are
the bodily appetites and the crude emotions of fear and resentment.
These first clamour for attention and must be assuaged or controlled
before the other sets come into play.

Now in this matter of physical appetites I do not know whether to
describe myself as a sensualist or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who
suppresses to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly
I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to
heedless gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find
myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will
speak of as the sense of Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in
me which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of
a sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse
quantitative assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I
refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its
use to the plane of the eye or the ear.

It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and
taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of
beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism
and sensuality comes in, it seems